You Deserve Each Other(35)
I think I see his new angle. It’s even more disturbing than trying to get me to leave him.
It’s cheaper and easier to mold me into the kind of woman he can stomach marrying rather than break up with me. If he does, he’ll have to field a hundred surprise dates his mother sends him on to find the next broodmare contender.
My baby oven and I have been primed and vetted. I’m already familiar with his odious parents, who haven’t managed to run me off yet. A compartment of my brain reluctantly hosts a glossary of dental terminology. I tolerate his satanic ritual of removing a banana wholly from its peel and laying the banana on the bare table without a plate, touching everything with his fingers and setting it down between bites.
I’m an investment. If he pulls his stock now, he’ll bleed money and lost time all over the place. He’ll be starting over, two years of his youth down the drain. But I’ve got news for Nicholas Benjamin Rose: if he thinks I’m not the biggest waste of time that’s ever happened to him, he’s got another think coming.
For long moments, I merely stare at the part of the house that ate him up. Details I still haven’t noticed properly are swimming to the forefront for attention—the wooden roof shingles all bowing at their centers; the dingy welcome mat with a Scottie dog on it; the silhouette pacing behind the wide leaded window. He wanted nature? He’s got it. English ivy swarms the chimney, trying to work its way down inside the house. The air is fresh and crisp. I don’t hear any traffic, any sound of human civilization.
The house he’s bought on his own, guaranteeing it will never feel like ours, sits up on a crest between two gently sloping valleys, and I think he’s picked a hell of a hill to die on. We’ll both be buried here. Our ghosts will haunt it, torturing each other and any misguided home buyers hoping for a country experience.
I’m still trying to orchestrate plan A, and Nicholas is subverting my efforts with plan C. Only one of us can win, but I’m no longer certain what the winner keeps and what they lose.
My favorite thing about the house that’s mine but not mine is that it’s dim and small and cozy, which doesn’t sound appealing when I put it that way, but each room has a very particular feel to it, which makes my imagination go bonkers.
The living room is exactly where you’d want to relax in a comfy armchair with grandchildren strewn at your feet in a semicircle as you read them old stories of faraway lands. Swashbuckling pirates and flying trains, masked bandits and elvish royalty. The books are leather-bound, spines crackling in your aging hands. You sit quietly in front of a flickering fire with your soul mate as raindrops patter the glass, more contented than a cat stretched out on a windowsill.
The living room is where your grandchildren’s fondest memories of you will be born, and that’s where they’ll always picture you long after you’re gone. Every time they smell wood smoke or hot chocolate, it will pull them back in time to the sound of your voice rising and falling like a melody as you read to them.
“What do you think?” Nicholas asks.
“Hmm.” I saunter past him into the kitchen, dissolving him with my mind powers so I can take it all in without his hovering.
The kitchen is airy and light, with exposed wood beams traversing the ceiling. Copper pots and pans and watering cans dangle from them like wind chimes. Green explosions of ivy burst from planters. The fragrance of freshly baked bread and sun-kissed linens on a clothesline perfume the air. In the summer, this is where you bite into a blackberry and feel the ripe flavors rupture on your tongue. In the spring, you lean over the sink and water the tulips kept in the window planter.
A kitchen witch lives here. She keeps a cauldron in the hearth and lays bundles of dried herbs across the overhead beams. There’s a scrubbed wooden table and mismatched chairs painted all the colors of St. Basil’s Cathedral. Toenails of the family dog go clack-clack-clack on the pine floors and everything about this room makes your heart lift into a smile.
“Doesn’t come with any appliances,” Nicholas says, “but that’s fine.” I stop walking and he accidentally bumps into me from behind. “Whoops. Sorry.”
“You wanna give me some space?”
“Well, you’re not saying anything.”
“I’m talking to myself right now. Give us a minute.”
It’s his turn to mutter “Hmm.” I’m glad when he ducks into the (one and only) bathroom, giving me a break from him.
The drawing room contains three tall, magnificent windows facing the woods out back. The yard beyond grades steeply, providing an excellent view of a pond with a long dock. This is the best room for stargazing. You part the luxurious red velvet curtains and watch a sickle moon arc over the forest, reflecting off the pond. This is where you keep your Christmas tree and a family of nutcrackers on the mantel. The walls are papered in midnight blue with silver foil stars and birch trees. Everything washes gold when the fire’s lit.
A replica of Grand Central Station’s clock is mounted to the newel post of the stairway right outside the drawing room, and in the middle of the night when you pad through the hushed house to curl up in a rocking chair on a thick woven rug, you pass the glowing face of the clock and hear its hands tick. The world is quiet save for the ticking of that clock, and the soft snores of your one true love sleeping upstairs, the rustling toss-and-turn of your small children, and the whispering of branches in the forest.